Friday, October 08, 2010

GMU spokesman Daniel Walsch confirms that the university, located in Fairfax, Va., is now investigating allegations that the Wegman report was partly plagiarized and contains fabrications. . .

Many bunnies will miss the significance of this. When a formal research or professional misconduct complaint is received, universities are required to open an inquiry. This is a less formal procedure, usually conducted by administrative personnel with or without academics taking part. it is very confidential. Only when the inquiry finds strong evidence of misconduct is a formal investigation opened. In this regard what Penn State did with respect to charges against Michael Mann was exceedingly irregular. First, they opened an inquiry without a formal complaint (which can be anonymous) on the basis of the uproar fed by friends of Judy (and no one else). Second they published their report, something that can be done but usually is not. Third they started a formal investigation without the inquiry finding grounds for it. This resulted in the second report. Eli should note that Prof. Mann agreed to these procedures. His co-author, Ray Bradley is not a happy camper either.

"Clearly, text was just lifted verbatim from my book and placed in the (Wegman) report," says Bradley, who is also one of the authors of the 1999 Nature study. In response to earlier concerns raised by the Deep Climate website, Bradley says he wrote a letter in April to GMU, noting the possibility of plagiarism and demanding an investigation of both the 2006 report and a subsequent, federally-funded study published by some of Wegman's students. "Talk about irony. It just seems surreal (that) these authors could criticize my work when they are lifting my words."

Many thanks to John Mashey and Deep Climate who have brought this academic misconduct to light.

GMU: well, it gets a lot of money from the Koch brothers, Richard Mellon Scaife, etc. Fed Signer was associated with one of its institutes.it has econ prof Williams, who features the OISM petition on his home page.

However, it is a mix of credible departments/good people and others that act more like a N. VA branch of the Kochs...

Do recall that GMU is the alma mater of Cuccinelli & his sidekick Wesley Russell, and Cuccinelli certainly got funding from Kochs and other fossil interests. Coincidences do happen.

The ultimate fraud here is the public support for this intentional mischief:

"In 1972, the Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia recommended that the college separate from its parent institution. On April 7, the governor signed the General Assembly legislation that established George Mason University as an independent member of the commonwealth's system of colleges and universities."http://www.gmu.edu/resources/visitors/history.html

Apparently these free-enterprisers don't think they get enough from the public trough:"GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITYOPERATIONAL DISCUSSIONSIncreasing State Funding"http://budget.gmu.edu/op%20discuss%20increase%20state%20funding.pdf

And again - two big thumbs up to John Mashey and Deep Climate for their tenacious work deconstructing Wegman.

There must be some curling toes in Wegman's and his co-authors' shoes about now, given that there are banners in both the mainstream media and in Nature announcing investigation into the W-report's naughtiness.

I am pleased to see that the web and internet blog community have enabled the current events, namely taking the fight back to the bullies - for that is what they are - but on fair justice terms, not on their terms. Deep Climate and John Mashey have performed an inestimably invaluable service in analysis and synthesis of an evidence trail revealing that Wegman et al may have a case to answer concerning plagiarism, an irony of the most wry kind, given Wegman's quite political role in the attack on Mann and by co-authorship, Bradley. Bradley's book is amply documented by John Mashey as having been subjected to what may be found through formal investigation as a major case of plagiarism and presumably copyright violations too.

I am ambivalent concerning the use of pro-active treatment of these opponents through means of legal, university inquiries, and detailed examination of their backgrounds. I mean, wouldn't it be nice if these particular individuals could have stuck to scientific and more generally analytical, logical and informed arguments in counterpoint to the climate scientists' overwhelmingly decisive choice of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) as the best explanation of why the global temperature is rising and other serious climatic shifts are occurring now? It would have been nice and the opponents would have lost that argument convincingly, in which case the political roles they enjoy should have been directed towards the best policies capable of doing what the climate scientists' most stable results emphatically tell us must be done.

Instead, they play chess, using their political powers of office to arbitrarily change the rules to their favour. After several years - prior to my use of blogs - of seeing this sort of behaviour occurring, as both documented by the MSM and encouraged or manufactured by the MSM, my feelings on the issue brought me to the place that many others are now at; that is to say, we must take the fight straight back to these people, but as a matter of principle and justice and integrity. Blogs have in a very large part allowed this to happen; I think this is because blogs have by default an open community rather than a closed one, and because blogs allow an immediacy of response to well-founded questions and issues - especially the raising of issues from half a world away.

I want desperately to be optimistic and to see these Jacks put back in their respective boxes, and for that to be the end of the dirty fighting tactics of the Jacks. To be clear, all of my comments are with respect to a few climate change opponents who have disregarded legitimate means of expressing their opposition as part of rational discourse within or about the climate science on AGW. Most sceptics and outright deniers, while obviously holding a different opinion about AGW to myself, act within the bounds of decency, robust though that may be when expressed through blogs. Those people are most certainly not the intended targets of my comments.

PS: Sorry 'bout the length of the post but this has been a hot-button item with me for so long now.

It would seem that all the diligent (and dare I say thankless) work he did regarding this matter may finally bear fruit. Though, it is also sad that it had to come to this.

Far too long have the anti-science crowd had near-total impunity concerning the FUD they chose to promulgate. I don't wish it on anyone, but instead of selfless, upstanding scientists like Dr. Mann having their name dragged through the mud, for once it's nice to see the deniers being subjected to the same degree of scrutiny.

Since someone asks about GMU, it is top notch school in it's fields. I'm one of those who would put it's law school grads to be in the top 5 best educated law school grads in the US( actual education received) and it's economics faculty is acquiring a world class reputation. As for the hard sciences, well they are taught at GMU but the university excels in economics and law (maybe public policy and I hear that one of the English department specialties has a reputation for quality) and shouldn't be a first choice school for anyone interested in a science career. Law & Economics you can count on being in the 1st tier of the US, the rest are what they are.

As always though, people are strange and you can sometimes fine top people at schools that don't deserve them for a variety of reasons.

From people who know people at GMU, I know there are good departments. I even sent SSWR to one of them early as a heads-up.

All I know of the law school is that it produced Cuccinelli and Russell.

I don't know much about the econ department, although it does have Walter Williams, who thinks OISM petition is so good he features it on his home page.

Pat Michaels taught for School of Public Policy this summer.The syllabus is interesting for "PUBLIC SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY". Good choice to teach that.

I offer a conjecture.Those who have read the main discussion in SSWR have seen my model of the Wegman Report as:a) A facade of reasonable papers, expected terms

b) Hiding the fact that the only papers that really counted were McIntyre&McKitrick.

GMU seems like:a) Some reasonable, normal departments, whose quality is distributed as usual. I've spoken at hundreds of universities. Even fine schools have poor departments, and vice-versa. I think these get most of the government grants.

b) Then there are departments with a strong political/ideological bent for training students like Cuccinelli.

c) and then there is a horde of institutes, like Mercatus, or Institute for Humane Studies, or odd units like CMPA or STATS.

Koch, Scaife & co fund c) and maybe some of b), and part of *their* Mission is hard-Libertarian disaasembly of government, especially environmental regulations.

It was barely aware of GMU until the last year, but it really is a nexus for climate anti-science. So, this is only an early hypothesis, but it may well be that much of the school is somewhat of a facade for the activities that really matter.

If so, then GMU's weird behavior with Wegman makes sense.

If you look up ELC, Environmental Literacy Council in CCC, it has this same feel. There are plenty of reasonable people, much reasonable literature ... but it was spun out of George Marshall Institute (bad sign), and mostly funded by Scaife, Koch, Olin (very bad signs). When you look closely, it turns out that anything to do with climate change gets carefully fuzzed. It's cleverly done, and many people involved may easily not have realized what was going on.

"Climate variation occurs as a response to climate forcings which can cause either a warming or a cooling of the atmospher.[sic] Over most of the Earth's history, the forcings have been entirely natural ...."http://www.enviroliteracy.org/category.php/1.html

".... it is not often that a meteorite strikes the Earth, volcanoes spew heavy soot and smoke which can block out enough sunlight to result in measurable cooling."... Since man-made greenhouse gases currently account for only a tiny percentage of the total greenhouse effect, the direct change to the Earth's energy balance from these gases is limited......."While climate modeling can help us understand many of the physical feedbacks and processes involved in our climate system, uncertainty will continue to exist since it often represents a more simplified version than what can be modeled accurately."http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/678.html

"A sketch of central England temperatures for the past 1000 years from the first (1990) IPCC report was highlighted in the Wegman report, but the report's version was altered, at least by shifting the time axis and truncating the recent temperature rise (already truncated at 1975 in the original). An unaltered version of the same sketch can be found in the NAS report; until now nobody seems to have noticed that Wegman (or a source or associate) had distorted the graph."http://arthur.shumwaysmith.com/life/content/deep_problems_with_the_wegman_report

I think that deserves reiterating, as many don't seem to understand the implications of plagiarism in an academic work and are shrugging it off as a misdemeanour.

What Americans typically mean by calling an ECONOMICS school top-notch is that it is heavily invested in some flavor of market fundamentalism. CF the Chicago school - where reputation was inversely proportional to achievements like mirroring reality or predicting future events or even giving advice that wasn't utterly ruinous.

My father went to GMU law school and it wasn't bad, it's above the middle but it's not one of the top 5, that's crazy talk.

"Well Eli admits to being very obscure, but see the first two comment..."

Holy Cow, Eli!... You are all representative of the men&women of science here. Please; just take all the words written on Blogs everywhere and homogenize the collected words, smooth everything out... Everybody gets to pick something they like:) FTS.) It is really all about the parsing words once we agree on PNS as the 'Bees-Knees'. We have yet to reach the Bronze Age?:o)

Pat Michaels didn't just teach a summer course at GMU. He's a "Distinguished Senior Fellow in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University" (http://www.cato.org/people/patrick-michaels)S. Fred Der Meistersinger has also been "Distinguished Research Professor, Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University"(http://www.sepp.org/about%20sepp/bios/singer/cvsfs.html)

It's quite apparent from the history and funding that GMU was set up specifically to provide an academic facade for the Cato "Institute" and other right-wing stink tanks. The motivation was evidently to have a publicly funded "anti-UVa" to promote the Libertarian anti-government/regulation/tax agenda. (Yes, Virginia, Irony is not dead.) Whether that permeates the more traditional academic departments remains to be seen, but the effects on anything related to economics or public policy should be obvious from the results.

"... results from a 20-month experiment with software that detects plagiarism. The software, called CrossCheck, rejected nearly a third of all submissions on suspicion that the content was pirated from previously published research. In some cases, more than 80 percent of a paper’s content was deemed unoriginal."

"All I know of the law school is that it produced Cuccinelli and Russell".

And that's a bad thing, John?

John , can I ask if you'rer going to receive psychiatric supervision when the GOP takes the house and the senate in November with polls showing a win only comparable to the 1894 wash out of the demolition party?

Climategate follies will be new fodder for the froshies taking over the House next year. I'm sure the NAS Hockey Stick follies will make the playlist, too!So stay tuned folks ~ a barrel of fun awaits us all.

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional. His colleagues are smart, but they have a curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they occasionally heed his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.